Marilyn Geewax

Doby Photography
/ NPR

Marilyn Geewax is a senior editor, assigning and editing business radio stories. She also serves as the national economics correspondent for the NPR web site, and regularly discusses economic issues on NPR's mid-day show Here & Now.

Her work contributed to NPR's 2011 Edward R. Murrow Award for hard news for "The Foreclosure Nightmare." Geewax also worked on the foreclosure-crisis coverage that was recognized with a 2009 Heywood Broun Award.

Before joining NPR in 2008, Geewax served as the national economics correspondent for Cox Newspapers' Washington Bureau. Before that, she worked at Cox's flagship paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, first as a business reporter and then as a columnist and editorial board member. She got her start as a business reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal.

Over the years, she has filed news stories from China, Japan, South Africa and Europe. Recently, she headed to Europe to participate in the RIAS German/American Journalist Exchange Program.

Geewax was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, where she studied economics and international relations. She earned a master's degree at Georgetown University, focusing on international economic affairs, and has a bachelor's degree from The Ohio State University.

She is a member of the National Press Club's Board of Governors and serves on the Global Economic Reporting Initiative Committee for the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

In a desk drawer, I have baggage tags from Eastern, TWA, Braniff, PanAm, Continental, Northwest and more.

As a journalist, I covered each of those airlines as they disappeared from the skies.

On Saturday, I can add one more to my defunct-carrier collection: US Airways will fade into history when its last flight, leaving from San Francisco on Friday night, lands in Philadelphia, scheduled for 6:18 a.m. ET.

And cheaper technology may be turning drones into affordable Christmas presents. In fact, one FAA official says a million new flying robots may be under Christmas trees this year as a result of price drops.

Now let's add that up and consider what it could mean for the last week of December:

Inexperienced travelers will be crowding airport security lines. And a million inexperienced operators will be sending up drones.

Someday, White House event organizers will be able to tell their grandchildren about this week.

But for now, they just have to get through it — with loads of energy and grace.

Staffers spent the first half of the week preparing for a visit from Pope Francis, who pulled up in a little Fiat. Now they are switching their focus to that most formal of Washington events: a state dinner. This one will honor Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The Federal Reserve decided Thursday to leave interest rates unchanged at historically low levels, even though the U.S. economy has been gaining strength.

Borrowers and lenders all over the world had been closely watching for the announcement that came at the end of a two-day Fed meeting. Many had been thinking the U.S. central bank would pick this date to change course and start nudging up interest rates.

The last time the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, it was summer of 2006 — back when Shakira was topping the music charts, Barry Bonds was breaking home run records and the housing bubble was still inflating.

That's quite a while ago.

In fact, the Fed has been depressing interest rates for so long that, in their adult lifetimes, millennials have never seen anything other than cheap loans for homes and cars.

This week, you'll hear lots and lots about the Federal Reserve, or "the Fed" as its friends call it.

The Fed is considering raising interest rates — and will announce that decision on Thursday. If the central bank were to act, it could have an impact on your financial life, forcing you to eventually pay more for car loans, credit cards, home equity loans and more. Or if you're a retiree with savings, a rate hike could boost your income.

This week on Wall Street, investors experienced thrills, chills, tears and giggles as their investments plunged, soared, dropped, rose, dipped, moved sideways — and then ended about where they started.

On Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average inched down 12 points to 16,643 for the day, ending a bit higher than last Friday's 16,459 close.

So if you just got back from spending a week on a tiny desert island with no smartphone, you might look at the Dow's close and think it was a pretty tame week.

For investors, a brutal week ended Friday with prices plunging for stocks and commodities. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 531 to 16,460, a 3.12 percent drop.

Oil's tumble was especially notable. For a while, West Texas crude was trading below $40 a barrel — the first time that happened since March 2009. It finished at $40.45, marking an eight-week stretch of price declines — the longest losing streak since 1986.

If you watch the news shows on Sunday mornings, or cable news at night, you've probably seen that ad where parents are dropping off their daughter at college. And then they start to fret about, well, something involving access to investment advice.